Livre d'Or

Heee! And here I am not talking about those bits - mostly because there's nothing there I disagree with. ;) Up to and including I think it's totally valid to experience the specific loneliness that comes from not having a life-partner.

I think the big thing is for me that the men who react that way to me aren't the loud-aggressive-MRA types: they're normal guys I otherwise quite like who nonetheless hit that state and move into those responses when told these things - up to and including "it'd be nice if you were careful when approaching women you don't know, because of these factors that make unknown men a risk" or "women often feel unable to say flat 'no's because of the negative and aggressive reactions they get when they do" ending up in a fifteen minute discussion of how women are awful and judgemental - because of the attitudes they're entrenched with.

Is it true that men who blame women for their loneliness with a sad affect rather than an angry one receive social approval?

Outside feminist spaces on the internet? Fuck yes. Actually outside feminist spaces on the internet, the angry ones get social approval, very, very often, and even more often they get "well I mean sure he's being a dick about it, but he's got a point, I mean, what is it with women?"

I'm also a little more jaundiced than you, I think - "sad affect", as far as I'm concerned, can absolutely be a manipulative weapon designed to trap people into doing what you want even when they really don't want to do it. Ironically this is a twitch I have more because of women than of men, but it still holds: "woe is me I am so miserable and sad because girls won't sleep with me and I'm so lonely and it's so hard, women make things so hard" may not be as bad as the ones who threaten to kill us, but the reality remains that the intent is to make women feel bad for something that isn't even remotely their responsibility, let alone their moral fault.

All of which makes me sound more hardcore about this in practice than I really am: I have a lot of time and patience for the ways in which we fuck ourselves up with false intentions, and a lot of concern for how patriarchy damages men as well as women - I have a father, I have cousins, I could one day have a son, if only for those reasons that matters to me a lot*. But much like I have a lot of sympathy for the fact that a lot of the bad behaviour of the four year old I look after is rooted in being four and having poor emotional regulation and so on, that doesn't change the fact that a) it's bad behaviour, b) it's going to have consequences, c) it's unacceptable and d) sometimes those consequences are going to make her very, very upset.

So it's complex; I'm just concerned that it's very easy given the climate of these things outside specific, rather rarified atmospheres (aka the corner of the internet I so happily inhabit) for things to end up very much on the "and now women will be emotionally responsible for easing lonely men out of their misapprehensions that cause them to be awful to women", because we're so used to women being (as Coburn notes) responsible for male emotions.

So it's fraught and it's not simple, just like most of these things aren't. And as my footnote suggests I think there are absolutely times when feminist spaces stray into uncool behaviours. I just think it's also important to note how the social-approval deck is stacked out there in most of the world, and what that means, and who's actually responsible for what.

I have deep sympathy for the way the patriarchy fucks men up. I have absolutely no sympathy for frustration due to the belief that if I would only fuck them, they'd get better. Where there's a chance to have a useful discussion about how working to ditch the latter belief would help both genders and how there needs to be some way to address that sense of self-worth etc, I'm there; where it's another round of "but really it's very hard to be male and so women should be nicer", I so am not.

*it also ties in really seriously with mental health stuff in that suicide is one of the top causes of death for men. And I have a lot of feelings and opinions about that and about how feminism is often seriously shit at dealing with the intersection of mental health period, let alone dealing with the mental health axis when it comes to men. Cf: Captain Awkward's rather horrifying "let's be absolutely vicious to a male anxiety sufferer trying to figure shit out" moment